Neurologist Francis Jensen examining a teenage patient.
Neurologist Francis Jensen examining a teenage patient. Jensen decided to study the teenage brain when her own sons became teenagers. Now Jensen lectures to teens and parents about how teenagers' brains are different.
When adolescence hit Frances Jensen's sons, she often found herself wondering, like all parents of teenagers, "What were you thinking?"
"It's a resounding mantra of parents and teachers," says Jensen, who's a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Like when son number one, Andrew, turned 16, dyed his hair black with red stripes and went off to school wearing studded leather and platform shoes. And his grades went south.
"I watched my child morph into another being, and yet I knew deep down inside it was the same Andrew," Jensen says. Suddenly her own children seemed like an alien species.
Jensen is a Harvard expert on epilepsy, not adolescent brain development. As she coped with her boys' sour moods and their exasperating assumption that somebody else will pick up their dirty clothes, she decided to investigate what neuroscientists are discovering about teenagers' brains that makes them behave that way.
Jensen's older son Andrew Murphy, now a physics major at Wesleyan, is the reason his mother first s
Richard Knox/NPR
Jensen's older son Andrew Murphy, now a physics major at Wesleyan, is the reason his mother first started studying the teenage brain. She wanted to find out what was causing his maddening teenage behavior. Teenage Brains Are Different
She learned that that it's not so much what teens are thinking — it's how.
Jensen says scientists used to think human brain development was pretty complete by age 10. Or as she puts it, that "a teenage brain is just an adult brain with fewer miles on it."
But it's not. To begin with, she says, a crucial part of the brain — the frontal lobes — are not fully connected. Really.
"It's the part of the brain that says: 'Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?' " Jensen says. "It's not that they don't have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they're going to access it more slowly."
That's because the nerve cells that connect teenagers' frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish. Teenagers don't have as much of the fatty coating called myelin, or "white matter," that adults have in this area.
Think of it as insulation on an electrical wire. Nerves need myelin for nerve signals to flow freely. Spotty or thin myelin leads to inefficient communication between one part of the brain and another.
Jensen's younger son Will Murphy is now a Harvard student.
Kathryn C Reed
Jensen's younger son Will Murphy is now a Harvard student. He says he learned a lot about his teenage brain from his mother. A Partially Connected Frontal Lobe
Jensen thinks this explains what was going on inside the brain of her younger son, Will, when he turned 16. Like Andrew, he'd been a good student, a straight arrow, with good grades and high SAT scores. But one morning on the way to school, he turned left in front of an oncoming vehicle. He and the other driver were OK, but there was serious damage to the car.
"It was, uh, totaled," Will says. "Down and out. And it was about 10 minutes before morning assembly. So most of the school passed by my wrecked car with me standing next to it."
"And lo and behold," his mother adds, "who was the other driver? It was a 21-year-old — also probably not with a completely connected frontal lobe." Recent studies show that neural insulation isn't complete until the mid-20s.
This also may explain why teenagers often seem so maddeningly self-centered. "You think of them as these surly, rude, selfish people," Jensen says. "Well, actually, that's the developmental stage they're at. They aren't yet at that place where they're thinking about — or capable, necessarily, of thinking about the effects of their behavior on other people. That requires insight."
And insight requires — that's right — a fully connected frontal lobe.
Teen Brains Are Not Fully Connected
The brain's "white matter" enables nerve signals to flow freely between different parts of the brain. In teenagers, the part that governs judgment is the last to be fully connected.
The brain's
Source: Nature Neuroscience 2003
Credit: Elizabeth Sowell More Vulnerable To Addiction
But that's not the only big difference in teenagers' brains. Nature made the brains of children and adolescents excitable. Their brain chemistry is tuned to be responsive to everything in their environment. After all, that's what makes kids learn so easily.
But this can work in ways that are not so good. Take alcohol, for example. Or nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy ...
"Addiction has been shown to be essentially a form of 'learning,' " Jensen says. After all, if the brain is wired to form new connections in response to the environment, and potent psychoactive drugs suddenly enter that environment, those substances are "tapping into a much more robust habit-forming ability that adolescents have, compared to adults."
So studies have shown that a teenager who smokes pot will still show cognitive deficits days later. An adult who smokes the same dose will return to cognitive baseline much faster.
This bit of knowledge came in handy in Jensen's own household.
"Most parents, they'll say, 'Don't drink, don't do drugs,'" says Will, son number two. "And I'm the type of kid who'd say 'why?' "
When Will asked why, his mom could give him chapter and verse on drugs and teen brains. So they would know, she says, "that if I smoke pot tonight and I have an exam in two days' time, I'm going to do worse. It's a fact."
There were other advantages to having a neuroscientist mom, Will says. Like when he was tempted to pull an all-nighter.
"She would say, 'read it tonight and then go to sleep,'" he says. "And what she explained to me is that it will take [what you've been reading] from your short-term memory and while you sleep you will consolidate it. And actually you will know it better in the morning than right before you went to sleep."
It worked every time, he says.
It also worked for Andrew, the former Goth. He's now a senior at Wesleyan University, majoring in physics.
"I think she's great! I would not be where I am without her in my life!" Andrew says of his mom.
For any parent who has survived teenagers, there are no sweeter
Damage to the brain of a teenage drinker, side view
EnlargeCourtesy of Susan Tapert/Tim McQueeny, UCSD
The red specks highlight where the integrity of the brain's white matter is significantly less in the teens who binge drink, compared to those who do not.
For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off.
A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't.
Tapert's team found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of the teens who drank. The researchers believe this damage negatively affects attention span in boys, and girls' ability to comprehend and interpret visual information.
"First of all, the adolescent brain is still undergoing several maturational processes that render it more vulnerable to some of the effects of substances," Tapert says.
In other words, key areas of the brain are still under construction during the adolescent years, and are more sensitive to the toxic effects of drugs and alcohol.
Damage to the brain of a teenage drinker, top view
Courtesy of Susan Tapert/Tim McQueeny, UCSD
Thought, Memory Functions Affected
For the study, published last month in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, Tapert looked at 12- to 14-year-olds before they used any alcohol or drugs. Over time, some of the kids started to drink, a few rather heavily — consuming four or five drinks per occasion, two or three times a month — classic binge drinking behavior in teens.
Comparing the young people who drank heavily with those who remained non-drinkers, Tapert's team found that the binge drinkers did worse on thinking and memory tests. There was also a distinct gender difference.
"For girls who had been engaging in heavy drinking during adolescence, it looks like they're performing more poorly on tests of spatial functioning, which links to mathematics, engineering kinds of functions," Tapert says.
And the boys?
"For boys who engaged in binge drinking during adolescence, we see poor performance on tests of attention — so being able to focus on something that might be somewhat boring, for a sustained period of time," Tapert says. "The magnitude of the difference is 10 percent. I like to think of it as the difference between an A and a B." Teenage Tendency To Experiment To Blame
Pediatrician and brain researcher Ron Dahl from the University of Pittsburgh notes that adolescents seem to have a higher tolerance for the negative immediate effects of binge drinking, such as feeling ill and nauseated.
"Which makes it easier to consume higher amounts and enjoy some of the positive aspects," Dahl says. "But, of course, that also creates a liability for the spiral of addiction and binge use of these substances."
He adds that there is a unique feature of the teenage brain that drives much behavior during adolescence: The teen brain is primed and ready for intense, all-consuming learning.
"Becoming passionate about a particular activity, a particular sport, passionate about literature or changing the world or a particular religion" is a normal, predictable part of being a teenager, he says.
"But those same tendencies to explore and try new things and try on new identities may also increase the likelihood of starting on negative pathways," he adds. Damaged Brain Tissue
Tapert wanted to find out in what way binge drinking affects a teen's developing brain. So using brain imaging, she focused on the white matter, or nerve tissue, of the brain.
"White matter is very important for the relay of information between brain cells; and we know that it is continuing to develop during adolescence," Tapert says.
So Tapert imaged the brains of two groups of high school students: binge drinkers and a matched group of teens with no history of binge drinking. She reports in her recent study a marked difference in the white matter of the binge drinkers.
"They appeared to have a number of little dings throughout their brains' white matter, indicating poor quality," Tapert says.
And poor quality of the brain's white matter indicates poor, inefficient communication between brain cells.
"These results were actually surprising to me because the binge drinking kids hadn't, in fact, engaged in a great deal of binge drinking. They were drinking on average once or twice a month, but when they did drink, it was to a relatively high quantity of at least four or five drinks an occasion," she says.
In another study, Tapert reported abnormal functioning in the hippocampus — a key area for memory formation — in teen binge drinkers. Reflecting their abnormal brain scans, the teen drinkers did more poorly on learning verbal material than their non-drinking counterparts.
What remains unknown, says Tapert, is if the cognitive downward slide in teenage binge drinkers is reversible.
Hardwired For Doom: Brain, Mind And Fate
9:12 am
January 25, 2010 www.npr.org By Adam Frank
"Get down from there!"
My 15-year-old son and I had just come out of the movie theater. After two hours of the usual explosions and mayhem (I can't really remember what movie we had seen) I made the mistake of telling him to wait outside while I chatted with a friend. Five minutes later I find him on the theater roof jumping from one large air conditioning unit to the other. "What are you crazy?" I yelled hoping to get him down, and us away, from there before the blue siren's arrived.
Well, yes. Of course he's crazy. He's 15. Ever since we made the mistake of watching District B13 my son has become a fan of Parkour, which is like freestyle skiing without skis or snow or mountains. Practitioners of Parkour (or its variant Free-running) believe that a good time equals climbing straight up the face of impossibly high walls or leaping from the roof of one 10 story building to another (even if there happens to be a city street in between them). It is a mix of gymnastics, rock climbing and insanity. It's beautiful, graceful and terrifying (if you are a parent). So of course my son loves it and yearns to be an adept. I am trying to guide him to something safer.
Which brings us to today's question. What is the balance between the hardwiring evolution has given us and the cultural programming we have given ourselves?
Brain researchers have found that thrill seeking like Parkour is, to some degree, programmed into the teenage brain. It's part of the need for intense learning. Eventually part of that learning will include internal dialogues like "Don't jump from that building. Its stupid and we will die." But until that kind maturation occurs teenagers need parents around to tell them "Don't jump from that building. Its stupid and you will die."
But we are more than just the hardwiring of our brains, aren't we? In many regards the brains we have now were set in place, genetically at least, some 50,000 years ago. But the difference in culturally constructed behavior between then (hunter-gathers living in small tribes) and now is so vast that we have clearly invented some powerful new behaviors. From the development of agriculture 9000 or so years ago to kingship based empires of the first few millennia BC to the crazy caffeine-fueled high-tech scramble we inhabit now, hasn't culture and not genetics driven our evolution?
This is a question of more than academic interest. One can imagine all kinds of genetically hardwired behavior that was really useful for small bands of social hominids a million years ago that present real problems for a now global species with nuclear weapons (among other toys). Evolutionary psychology combined with impressive advances in brain science is an exciting branch of research that lays bare the physical causes of some aspects of our behavior. But how much of that behavior is hardwired and how much lies in the "new" evolutionary domains of culture (created via the imagination)?
There is the world we are born into and the one we create. What are the boundaries between them and how much play do we have in pushing those boundaries around?
Tiny metal electrodes are attached to Albert Einstein's head
EnlargeAP/NAP
Tiny metal electrodes are attached to Albert Einstein's head to pick up impulses from his brain and to magnify and record them for study in 1950 in Princeton, N.J. Dr. Alejandro Arellano kneels beside him. June 2, 2010
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein's death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein's genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works. In The Name Of Science
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.
The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.
"It was like the death of the prophet," Paterniti says. "And so it got a little bit crazy."
Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.
But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.
"And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances," Paterniti says.
The Man Behind The Marvelous Brain
Although famous for his groundbreaking contributions to science, Albert Einstein's rebellious and eccentric sides were also well-known. Biographers wrote that he struggled at school; and his refusal to wear socks became common knowledge. Here are five more noteworthy facts about Einstein's life.
1. In 1952, shortly after the death of Israel's first president, Einstein was offered the job. He declined. In the letter he wrote to the diplomat who offered him the job, one reason he gave was that he wouldn't be good at working with people.
2. When Einstein wanted to divorce his first wife, Mileva Maric, he told her he would win the Nobel Prize one day and give her his future winnings if she'd grant him a divorce. Maric accepted, but had to wait three years for the prize money.
3. As a child, Einstein didn't start talking until he was 3 years old. He continued to have trouble speaking through elementary school, and was still not completely fluent in his own language as a 9-year-old.
4. Einstein's second wife, Elsa Einstein, was also his first cousin.
5. One of Einstein's earliest inspirations was a compass. When given one at age 5, he became transfixed by the needle and wondered what gave it the ability to always swing in the right direction. Source: Time, news reports, NPR research, American Decades, Notable Mathematicians, Gale Biography Resource Center --Rose Raymond/NPR
Harvey later said Einstein's older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.
In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science.
"He believed that his role was to preserve this brain and to put it in the hands of some leading neuroanatomists who might be able to figure out the key to Einstein's genius," Paterniti says. On The Road With Einstein's Brain
Paterniti caught up with Harvey 40 years later, when the writer became intrigued by the story of Einstein's brain. Over the phone, the men hatched a plan to return the brain to Einstein's granddaughter Evelyn, who was living in Berkeley, Calif.
By that time, Harvey was in his 80s and living alone just a few miles from Princeton.
Paterniti drove down from his home in Maine in a rented Buick Skylark. When he arrived, Harvey was ready to go.
"He brought out his bags," Paterniti says, "and in one bag he had a Tupperware container in which he had stashed the brain."
They put everything in the trunk and started driving west.
Paterniti describes the trip in his book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. The book includes some mind-blowing weirdness, including a stop in Lawrence, Kan., to visit Harvey's former neighbor, the writer and heroin addict William S. Burroughs.
Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein's brain to various neuroscientists.
"So, he didn't have the entire brain and much of it was sliced up," Paterniti says. What Came In A Mayonnaise Jar
One scientist who'd asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein's brain.
Diamond doesn't talk about her part of this story anymore. But during a 1985 lecture in New York, she described what happened after she asked Harvey for the samples: Harvey agreed to send them, she said, but months went by and nothing happened. Then, three years later, the chunks of brain tissue arrived by mail in a mayonnaise jar.
At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein's brain that he didn't have a lot of extra neurons.
Astrocytes appear star-like after they're stained.
EnlargeJonathan Cohen/National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH
Astrocytes appear star-like after they're stained.
But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.
Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein's brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking.
The discovery got a fair amount of attention in the media. But scientists really didn't know what to make of it, says Doug Fields, a brain researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
It was "just an intriguing and peculiar finding, and kind of made people wonder what these astrocytes could be doing," Fields says.
But could they be involved in Einstein's genius in any way?
"At the time it seemed a little bit crazy that they could," Fields says. Discovering The Other Brain
Then in 1990, a Stanford University researcher named Stephen J. Smith published a paper in the journal Science that would change everything.
Smith knew that neurons communicate using a combination of electrical charges and chemical signals. Scientists had figured that out a long time ago because the electrical charges are hard to miss.
Smith suspected that astrocytes might also have the ability to communicate, but were doing so using only chemical signals, which are easy to miss if you're not looking for them.
And Smith had an even wilder idea: Maybe astrocytes were actually eavesdropping on the chemical conversations between neurons, and rebroadcasting them to distant areas of the brain.
If Smith was right, it would mean that astrocytes could be involved in learning, memory and even genius. Smith tested his idea on living astrocytes taken from a mouse. And Fields, in his lab at the NIH, offered to re-create that landmark experiment.
Astrocytes Communicating
Dr. Fields drips a drop of the neurotransmitter onto the astrocyte cells, which sense the chemical and light up. Then, waves of color radiate out as the chemical message passes from one astrocyte to the next.
Source: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH
Credit: R. Douglas Fields
He's staring through a microscope at a dish of astrocytes, which look like stars in a dark night sky.
"I'm going to get a little bit of this glutamate neurotransmitter in a pipette and just drop a bit of it into this culture dish," he says. "And we'll see if the astrocytes can sense that neurotransmitter."
The neurotransmitter in the pipette is glutamate, a chemical messenger often used by neurons.
"OK, I've applied the neurotransmitter," Fields says.
Fields then points to a computer screen filled with a video image of the dish of astrocytes. "Do you see that?" he asks as a cluster of astrocytes lights up with a flash of intense, warm colors.
Then, slowly, great waves of color radiate out from the initial point of contact. The chemical message is passing from one astrocyte to the next.
"I just wish I could get across the amazement of that finding — that these cells that were thought to be stuffing between neurons were communicating," Fields says.
It was like finding a whole other brain within the one we already knew about, Fields says. He says that idea inspired the title of his new book, The Other Brain, which describes how discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.
"Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes," Fields says. "And now it's not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein's brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing." Destiny Fulfilled
Fields' book begins with the story of Thomas Harvey stealing Einstein's brain.
Harvey never got a chance to read it. He died in 2007. But there's little doubt he would have been pleased to know that, even in a roundabout way, his actions helped scientists learn something about the nature of genius.
"I think there would be some sense of destiny fulfilled if he knew that," Paterniti says.
As for the stolen brain, Harvey never did give it to Einstein's granddaughter, Paterniti says. She didn't want it.
So Harvey returned the brain to the pathology department at Princeton University, where it remains.
You're Not My Mother: Seeing Impostors
Jad Abumrad and Soren Wheeler
March 30, 2010
Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET
Magritte's painting, The Intimate Newspaper
Rene Magritte/Corbis
Magritte's 1964 painting The Intimate Newspaper gets us thinking: Who is this? A familiar friend or a complete stranger?
Fall For An Illusion
text sizeAAAMarch 30, 2010
In the classic 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the residents of a fictional town in California are beset by the feeling that their friends and family have been replaced by impostors. In the movie, this apparent delusion is not delusional at all: The townspeople are in fact being replaced — by aliens, no less.
Numerous sci-fi films since have capitalized on our fear of being surrounded by duplicates — replicas who look just like our loved ones but are not. And while there have so far been no confirmed cases of a human being replaced by an alien or any other life-form, the feeling that your loved one has been replaced by someone else can be very real.
Consider these two true stories:
A 37-year-old woman came into the office of Carol Berman, a psychiatrist at New York University Medical Center, with a strange complaint. She had returned to her house recently to find a man sitting on her couch. He was familiar, sort of, and he was wearing her husband's clothes. But something didn't feel right to this woman. She felt a strange kind of emptiness when she looked at him. She was struck by the very deep sense that her husband had somehow been replaced by this strange man.
A student at the University of California, San Diego was severely injured in a car accident. After several weeks in a coma, he regained consciousness and seemed to be doing fine. But according to V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the university, when the patient's mother came to see him, he exclaimed, "Who is this woman? She looks just like my mother, but she's an impostor! She's some other woman pretending to be my mother." Rare Delusional Disorder
Both patients, it turns out, were suffering from a rare delusional disorder, called Capgras. Capgras delusion can be brought about by a variety of conditions — changes in brain chemistry associated with different mental illnesses, or physical trauma to the brain — but the delusion always involves the distinct feeling that the people around you have been replaced by impostors. While they may look and act just like the real person, some essence of the person is missing, almost as though "the soul of the person isn't in there," Berman says.
Jean Marie Joseph Capgras during WWII
Courtesy of Douwe Draaisma
Capgras delusion was first identified by French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras. In a 1923 paper, he wrote about a patient, "Madame M," who for 10 years had been "transforming everyone in her entourage, even those closest to her, such as her husband and daughter, into various and numerous doubles."
Currently, no one is certain of the underlying cause of Capgras, and there are different ways of explaining what is happening to these people. According to Berman, Capgras might be caused by psychological dissonance. There are usually things about the people close to us that we don't like. Normally, we combine these things with the parts we do like and develop a general emotional response to the whole person. But in some extreme cases, a change in character or a newly noticed behavior can just be too difficult to accept, to integrate into the whole. And so, rather than reframing our sense of who that person is, our brain just says: "That must not really be him."
Ramachandran thinks that Capgras can be better explained by a structural problem in the brain. According to Ramachandran, when we see someone we know, a part of our brain called the fusiform gyrus identifies the face: "That looks like mom!" That message is then sent to the amygdala, the part of our brains that activates the emotions we associate with that person. In patients experiencing Capgras, Ramachandran says, the connection between visual recognition and emotional recognition is severed. Thus the patient is left with a convincing face — "That looks like mom!" — but none of the accompanying feelings about his mother. That's Not My Mother
Ramachandran holds that we are so dependent on our emotional reactions to the world around us, that the emotional feeling "that's not my mother" wins out over the visual perception that it is. The compromise worked out by the brain is that your mother was somehow replaced, and this imposter is part of a malevolent scheme.
Ramachandran thinks there's good evidence for this explanation of Capgras, in part because of an odd quirk in his patient's behavior. When his mother calls him on the phone and he hears her voice, he instantly recognizes her. Yet if she walks in the room after that call, he is again convinced that she is an impostor.
Why? Ramachandran says that our visual system and auditory system have different connections to the amygdala, so while the auditory recognition triggers an emotional response in his patient, visual recognition does not. Treating The Illness
Capgras is very rare, and little is known about how to treat it. Those who have been afflicted with Capgras due to physical brain trauma may eventually re-establish the connection between perception and emotion. (Ramachandran's patient, for example, eventually recovered from his delusion.) And patients who experience Capgras alongside other mental disorders may be helped by medication. But for many Capgras patients, there is no treatment, and no amount of talk or reasoning can cure them.
While the feeling that the people around you have been replaced by impostors is certainly terrifying to imagine, the effect on the supposed impostor can be devastating, too. Carol Berman's husband began suffering Capgras after the onset of a particular kind of dementia in which neural transmission between different parts of the brain decays. Some days he knows that Berman is his wife. But other days, the woman who walks through the door is an imposter.
"I hope he's recognizing me," says Berman, "but you never know what you're going to get when you get back home."
All Things Considered February 22, 2010
People who struggle to remember faces can blame their parents.
That's because the ability to remember a face is inherited, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers also found that people who are good at remembering faces are not necessarily good at other memory tasks.
Taken together, these results strongly support the idea that face recognition ability comes from a dedicated circuit, or set of circuits, in the brain.
Facial Recognition Test
Courtesy of Jeremy Wilmer
An illustration from the face-recognition study. Nearly 300 pairs of twins were asked to memorize six faces. They were then shown three more faces and asked to identify the one face they had seen before. Identical Twins, Nearly Identical Ability To Remember
The paper, which comes from an international team, included two different studies.
The first looked at nearly 300 pairs of twins. Some were identical, meaning they share all their genes; others were nonidentical twins, who share only half their genes.
All the twins took a test that involved memorizing six faces. Then, participants were shown three more faces and were asked to identify the one face in this group they had seen before.
Web Resources
Study Findings In PNASTest Your Own Face Recognition Ability
The face recognition ability of pairs of nonidentical twins often differed quite a bit, says Jeremy Wilmer, the study's lead author and a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
But that wasn't the case with pairs of identical twins, whose performance was "extraordinarily similar," Wilmer says.
These results offer strong evidence that "face recognition ability is a highly familial trait," Wilmer says. Using A Special Part Of The Brain
The second study used a Web site to test the ability of several thousand people to remember faces, word pairs and abstract art images. The study found no link between face recognition ability and scores on the other tasks.
All of this supports the idea that there is a part of the brain that specializes in processing faces, says Nancy Kanwisher, a brain scientist at MIT.
The most likely candidate is the "fusiform face area," which is located "just behind and underneath, and a bit from your right ear," Kanwisher says.
She says it makes sense that our genes would include special code for such an area, because faces are so important to humans and some other primates.
Faces tell us whether we know a person, what mood they're in, how old they are, and whether they are looking at us or something else, Kanwisher says. "All this rich visual information you can get from a brief glimpse of a face."
Face recognition appears to be so basic, she says, that it is actually hard-wired into the brain. Similar Findings In Monkeys
Japanese researchers provided strong evidence of this in an experiment with monkeys a couple of years ago, Kanwisher says.
The researchers spent years raising monkeys who never saw a face — human or monkey. The animals were separated from other monkeys, and their human caretakers wore masks.
Even so, when the monkeys were tested, they had "adult-like face discrimination abilities," Kanwisher says, adding that this is probably because the ability to recognize faces is carried in our genes and present from birth.
The finding in monkeys is consistent with experiments on human babies just a few days old, Wilmer says.
When a baby is presented with representations of things like a circle or square and a face, Wilmer says, "The baby will spend a lot of time looking at the face relative to the other things."
The Center for Brain and Cognition, UCSD
In one experiment, Ramachandran used a mirror and a cardboard box to perform the first "successful amputation of a phantom limb."
Ever wonder how your brain communicates with your fingers and toes? It all happens deep inside the brain, in a region known as the cortex. And to explain it all, neuroscientists came up with the idea of the “homunculus,” or “little man.” A WHAT Lives Inside My Brain?March 18, 2009 text sizeAAAMarch 18, 2009
We've all heard the expression "I know it like the back of my hand." But just how well do we really understand our relationship to our hands, our legs, or any of our other various body parts? Dr. V.S. Ramachandran's innovative studies plumb many of the uncharted depths in our understanding of how our bodies and our brains relate to each other, often revealing unexpectedly complex processes for recognizing our physical selves.
In one breakthrough example, Ramachandran, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, devised a seemingly simple experiment to explore a puzzle that has confounded doctors since at least the 16th century: the sensation that a ghostly limb remains after the amputation of a body part. A Haunting Sensation
The French military surgeon Ambroise Pare, working in the mid-1500s, is believed to have been the first to describe this sensation.
In 1872, the experience was given its modern name when Silas Weir Mitchell, another military surgeon, coined the term "phantom limb." He based it on his experiences at Philadelphia's "Stump Hospital" during the Civil War.
According to Ramachandran, the majority of those who lose a limb experience some impression that the limb is still present. In some cases, a person may only feel it immediately after the loss. And for others, the phantom limb feels not only present, but also quite painful. A Cause For Reflection
One of Ramachandran's patients complained that he was suffering from an excruciating cramping in his phantom arm. He felt that his phantom hand was clenched so tightly, he could feel his fingernails digging into his phantom palm. The patient was in no way delusional. He knew his arm had been amputated and that the pain was emanating from a nonexistent limb. Yet his grasp of this reality was no match for his perceived pain.
Ramachandran came up with an unusual treatment. He placed a mirror in a cardboard box and instructed the patient to place his existing hand inside the box, next to the mirror. When the patient looked down at the mirror, the reflection of his existing hand stood in as a visual replacement of his phantom limb. The patient was told to imagine that the reflection was in fact the lost limb, and to practice clenching and unclenching his hand while looking in the mirror.
To the patient's surprise — and Ramachandran's — the illusion worked. After two weeks, the patient's pain vanished, along with his perception of a phantom arm. Mind Over Matter?
How can a limb that no longer exists "feel" pain? And why do some phantom-limb sufferers gain relief from a low-tech optical illusion that tricks their brains into believing something they already know?
Clearly, the body and the brain are intricately involved in the perception of the physical self. But when sensory experiences don't match the brain's perceptions, how is this difference reconciled, and what can we learn from the disconnect?
Herman Melville's iconic Captain Ahab, who himself was haunted by the ghost of a lost leg, ominously raised a timeless question about the discord that can occur between the body and brain: "If I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pans of hell for ever, and without a body?" If the sensation of a leg can persist long after it ceases to exist, what about the rest of a body? Where is the line drawn between the physical self and the perception of self? Our Bodies, Our Brains, Ourselves?
In a sense, Ramachandran explains, the entire body can be thought of as a type of phantom. And through this phantom construction, the brain can interpret our sensory experiences as we interact with our environment.
The sensation of phantom limbs, and the experiences of patients who are able to relearn the way their brains perceive these phantoms, raise a host of fascinating questions.
Neither purely physical explanations (that the irritation of severed nerves causes phantom feelings) nor purely psychological explanations (that feeling a phantom limb is a form of mental denial) can fully explain what patients describe.
Instead, Ramachandran believes that a complex interaction between the physical and the mental is at play. The brain must reconcile the physical experiences of the body with the mental image, or cortical map, it has of the body. And as the body changes, this mental image can also be remapped.
Unfortunately, in the case of phantom limbs, the mental image doesn't follow the change in the body. That's how you end up feeling pain in an arm that isn't there. But with a mirror and a little creative thinking, Ramachandran was able to trick the brain into remapping its mental image, pulling off what he calls the first "successful amputation of a phantom limb."
All Things Considered January 30, 2008
The human brain can, indeed, make up things that aren't there — sights, sounds, feelings. Michele Norris has a literary reminder of a famous hallucination: Captain Ahab, from Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. Ahab lost his leg but can feel it still.
Enlarge2face/Wayne Roth/Corbis
Visual hallucinations are a feature of Charles Bonnet syndrome. These phantom images are often "seen" by people with severe visual impairments caused by macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa January 30, 2008
It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind.
A former long-time executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., Stewart has a hereditary disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects the rods and cones in his eyes. In his 20s, his vision narrowed. By the time he hit 80, he was almost totally blind.
But then he discovered that sometimes blindness comes with a bonus.
One day while listening to a book on tape — 1776 by David McCullough — he heard how American sailors helped George Washington sneak cannons and horses across the Hudson River to escape the British.
As Stewart mused about those sailors, very strangely, one of them appeared in his head — not a dreamy fantasy, but a vivid, highly detailed, very real-like hallucination.
"He had on a cap, a blue cap with a polished black beak and he had a pipe in his mouth." The sailor gazed right at Stewart. Then he winked. Stewart was amazed.
Stewart was, at this point, very blind. He had lost his memory for color — for blues, yellows and reds — and he lived in a black and white world. But when his sailor arrived, "There it was!" he exclaimed. "The first color I had seen for a considerable amount of time!"
After 30 minutes, the image faded, but others would follow. Paintings would come to life. Wallpaper would move. Mysterious curtains would appear. Stewart says he was never frightened, but he wondered what triggered all this. Who Put that Sailor in My Head?
One of his sons, who already is experiencing this same disease, found the explanation. Stewart has Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition that often affects people with macular degeneration or diabetic eye disease. A surprisingly large percentage of people who lose sight start seeing things, says ophthalmologist Jonathan Trobe of the University of Michigan.
"The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says Trobe. When visual cells in the brain stop getting information — which happens when your rods and cones stop working — the cells compensate, he explains. If there's no data coming in, they make up images. They hallucinate.
Trobe thinks maybe 10 percent of all people who go blind will have this experience. "It's very common," he says.
In 2004, scientists at Harvard blindfolded normal, sighted people, and within hours many of them began to see imaginary landscapes, patterns and occasionally people.
Very often, says Trobe, elderly patients are afraid to mention these appearances, fearing that family members or doctors will think them mentally unstable. And while some people do get frightened by what they see in their heads, most don't.
Stewart, in fact, says he has learned to enjoy his phantoms. He can even trigger them, he thinks. Tuna Sashimi and Pink Dresses
When he was going blind, Stewart was advised to eat fish as often as possible, so he developed a thing for tuna, especially tuna sashimi.
Before our interview, he told me that tuna at lunch often triggers hallucinations. So Jessica, my producer, brought him a private stash. And sure enough, about 10 minutes later he matter-of-factly "noticed" a green curtain in the room.
I couldn't see a curtain. I couldn't see the office globe that followed floating through the air. I couldn't see the pink dress that came after the globe.
The thing is, Stewart shows no signs of being a flake or a hysteric. He was a manager, a financial officer, a pioneer in arts broadcasting in Europe. He's a sober man who has discovered, to his delight, that he can still experience color, even though, technically there is nothing there for him to see.
It's an experience manufactured by his hallucinating brain. But rather than be spooked by these phantoms, he wants more of them. It's as though, having been deprived of sight, he has figured out a final end run and instead of seeing from the outside in, he now sees from the inside out.
And if Stewart's hallucinating brain interests you, check out the story about what happens to deaf people who also hallucinate. You'll learn about an older lady who "heard" the voice of what may have been her long-dead mother.
Or, listen to what happened to a young sailor, not deaf, who was just stuck on an empty, flat quiet ocean for two weeks and "heard" phantom heavy metal guitar riffs and bagpipes. Special thanks to independent producer Mary Beth Kirchner. Support for this story was provided by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.
Jesse Neider for NPR April 26, 2010
The drama class had just gotten out, and everybody was standing around talking when Jessica noticed her 9-year-old, Isabelle, making her way over to an elderly woman Jessica had never seen. The woman was neatly dressed, most likely just a well-meaning suburban grandmother who had come to retrieve a grandchild on behalf of an over-extended parent, most likely a perfectly harmless person.
Isabelle, as she usually did, exchanged hellos and struck up a conversation. It was the usual post-drama-class conversation until about two minutes in. Then Isabelle dropped the bomb.
"Will you take me? Can I go home with you?" Jessica heard Isabelle plead. Driven To Trust
Jessica's daughter, Isabelle, has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder with a number of symptoms. Children with Williams are often physically small and frequently have developmental delays. But also, kids and adults with Williams love people, and they are literally pathologically trusting. They have no social fear. Researchers theorize that this is probably because of a problem in their limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. There appears to be a disregulation in one of the chemicals (oxytocin) that signals when to trust and when to distrust.
This means that it is essentially biologically impossible for kids like Isabelle to distrust. (NPR is not using full names in this story for privacy and safety reasons.)
"They don't have that kind of evolutionary thing that other kids have, that little twinge of anxiety like, 'Who is this person? What should I do here?' " Jessica explains. "They just don't have it. She just doesn't have that ... early-warning system."
For Jessica, there are good and bad things about parenting a child with this kind of personality.
For instance, when Isabelle was younger, she was chronically happy. She smiled at anything. She loved everyone: family, friends, strangers. She reached for them all, and, in return, everyone loved her. Strangers would stop Jessica to tell about how adorably loving Isabelle was.
In those days, Jessica says, she and her family were more or less tolerant of Isabelle's trusting and loving nature. "We would try to restrain her, but it was somewhat half-heartedly, because we didn't want to embarrass her by calling her on the carpet about how open she was," Jessica says. The Danger Of Unconditional Trust
But as Isabelle got older, the negative side of her trusting nature began to play a larger role. A typical example happened a couple of years ago, when Jessica and her family were spending the day at the beach. Isabelle had been begging Jessica to go to Dairy Queen, and Jessica had been putting her off. Then Isabelle overheard a lady just down the beach.
Isabelle practices training the family dog, "Betsy," with her dad.
EnlargeJesse Neider for NPR
Isabelle practices training the family dog, "Betsy," with her dad.
"She was telling her kids, 'OK, let's go to the Dairy Queen,' " Jessica says. "And so Isabelle went over and got into the lady's van, got in the back seat, buckled up and was waiting to be taken to Dairy Queen with that family."
Jessica had no idea what had happened to Isabelle and was frantically searching for her when the driver of the van approached her and explained that she had been starting her car when she looked up and saw Isabelle's face in the rearview mirror.
The woman, Jessica says, was incredibly angry.
"She said, 'I am a stranger, you know!' " Jessica says. Essentially, the woman blamed Jessica for not keeping closer watch on her daughter -- for neglecting to teach her the importance of not getting into a car with someone she didn’t know. But the reality could not be more different. "It's like, 'My friend, you have no idea,' " Jessica says.
In fact, because of Isabelle, Jessica has had to rethink even the most basic elements of her day-to-day life. She can not take Isabelle to the dog park. She tries not to take Isabelle to the store. And when the doorbell rings, Jessica will leap over a coffee table to intercept her.
It's not just Jessica and her family who must be vigilant. Every teacher at Isabelle's public school has been warned. Isabelle is not allowed to tell them that she loves them. Isabelle is not supposed to tell other schoolchildren that she loves them. And there are other restrictions.
"She's not allowed to go to the bathroom alone at her school, because there have been numerous instances of girls with Williams syndrome being molested at school when they were alone in the hallway," Jessica says. "And these are like middle class type schools. So it's a very real problem. And, you know, I'd rather her be overly safe than be on CNN." Raising A Child With Williams Syndrome
Jessica spoke with me for over an hour in the family's home in their woodsy, suburban neighborhood while we waited for her three children to come home from school. Then, just after I turned off my recorder to take a break, I felt two small arms circle my neck from behind. It was Isabelle. She had crept in from school and was giving me a hug.
I turned around, and quite suddenly, the room was filled with questions. Who was I? What was I doing here? Which TV show did I like? Did I know the Muppets?
Then Isabelle took my microphone in her hands. She had decided to sing me a song:
"You're my friend ... You're my friend in the whole world," she crooned. "You look so nice and so beautiful and so sweet."
When Isabelle speaks, she has a slight nasal slur. She also has some cognitive issues. Though she goes to a regular school and sits in a regular third-grade class, her attention is very jumpy, and she needs aids to help her.
These cognitive issues make Jessica's job more difficult. Jessica has decided that the most important thing for her to do is to teach Isabelle how to distrust. For years, that has been her life project -- a battle pitched against biology itself.
Jessica and her husband have made Isabelle books about how to behave around strangers. They have rented videos, they have bought educational toys. They have modeled the right behaviors, constructed sticker charts and employed every other trick they could possibly think of. But distrust, it seems, is almost impossible to teach their child. Sometimes Isabelle manages to remember not to tell perfect strangers that she loves them. Mostly, she doesn't.
But Jessica is determined. "We just have to restart every time," she says. "It's just what we have to do."
It's what they have to do, Jessica reasons, because she won't be around to protect her daughter forever. And though Isabelle trusts the world completely, the world is not a place worthy of complete trust.
Even in their current life, Jessica says, there are moments when she realizes that she's just an instant away from something terrible.
"We live a very sheltered life, but I can think of times when we were at the pool and I turn around to talk to someone, and I see her practically sitting on some man's lap at the pool, and he looks very uncomfortable," Jessica says. "And I just think: This is not good." Unconditional Love, And A Mother's Worry
Fortunately, Jessica says, the experts tell her it will eventually get better. She needs to just keep at it. One day, they tell her, Isabelle will be able to learn not to feel distrust, per se, but to master a set of algorithms that will allow her to safely navigate the world. She will learn, for example, not to get into a car with a stranger if she has become lost or disoriented, but to ask some person in a uniform for help instead.
In the meantime, Jessica says there are plenty of rewards to this life -- a life with a child with boundless love and trust.
"She'll ask me, 'So how are you today, my darling?' " Jessica says. "And it just makes you smile."
In fact, late in the afternoon on the day I visited, everyone in the family gathered in the kitchen to eat dinner. Isabelle, who loves music, decided to play a CD.
The CD player stuttered then came to life, and Isabelle approached her father.
"Will you dance with me, my sweetie?" she asked.
Her father picked her up in his arms. He spun her round and round.
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC: Beautiful teenage brains
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/teenage-brains/dobbs-text
TIME MAGAZINE - What makes teens tick?
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994126,00.html
The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet
by Richard Knox
March 1, 2010 www.npr.org
Neurologist Francis Jensen examining a teenage patient. Jensen decided to study the teenage brain when her own sons became teenagers. Now Jensen lectures to teens and parents about how teenagers' brains are different.
When adolescence hit Frances Jensen's sons, she often found herself wondering, like all parents of teenagers, "What were you thinking?"
"It's a resounding mantra of parents and teachers," says Jensen, who's a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital in Boston.
Like when son number one, Andrew, turned 16, dyed his hair black with red stripes and went off to school wearing studded leather and platform shoes. And his grades went south.
"I watched my child morph into another being, and yet I knew deep down inside it was the same Andrew," Jensen says. Suddenly her own children seemed like an alien species.
Jensen is a Harvard expert on epilepsy, not adolescent brain development. As she coped with her boys' sour moods and their exasperating assumption that somebody else will pick up their dirty clothes, she decided to investigate what neuroscientists are discovering about teenagers' brains that makes them behave that way.
Richard Knox/NPR
Jensen's older son Andrew Murphy, now a physics major at Wesleyan, is the reason his mother first started studying the teenage brain. She wanted to find out what was causing his maddening teenage behavior.
Teenage Brains Are Different
She learned that that it's not so much what teens are thinking — it's how.
Jensen says scientists used to think human brain development was pretty complete by age 10. Or as she puts it, that "a teenage brain is just an adult brain with fewer miles on it."
But it's not. To begin with, she says, a crucial part of the brain — the frontal lobes — are not fully connected. Really.
"It's the part of the brain that says: 'Is this a good idea? What is the consequence of this action?' " Jensen says. "It's not that they don't have a frontal lobe. And they can use it. But they're going to access it more slowly."
That's because the nerve cells that connect teenagers' frontal lobes with the rest of their brains are sluggish. Teenagers don't have as much of the fatty coating called myelin, or "white matter," that adults have in this area.
Think of it as insulation on an electrical wire. Nerves need myelin for nerve signals to flow freely. Spotty or thin myelin leads to inefficient communication between one part of the brain and another.
Jensen's younger son Will Murphy is now a Harvard student. He says he learned a lot about his teenage brain from his mother.
A Partially Connected Frontal Lobe
Jensen thinks this explains what was going on inside the brain of her younger son, Will, when he turned 16. Like Andrew, he'd been a good student, a straight arrow, with good grades and high SAT scores. But one morning on the way to school, he turned left in front of an oncoming vehicle. He and the other driver were OK, but there was serious damage to the car.
"It was, uh, totaled," Will says. "Down and out. And it was about 10 minutes before morning assembly. So most of the school passed by my wrecked car with me standing next to it."
"And lo and behold," his mother adds, "who was the other driver? It was a 21-year-old — also probably not with a completely connected frontal lobe." Recent studies show that neural insulation isn't complete until the mid-20s.
This also may explain why teenagers often seem so maddeningly self-centered. "You think of them as these surly, rude, selfish people," Jensen says. "Well, actually, that's the developmental stage they're at. They aren't yet at that place where they're thinking about — or capable, necessarily, of thinking about the effects of their behavior on other people. That requires insight."
And insight requires — that's right — a fully connected frontal lobe.
Teen Brains Are Not Fully Connected
The brain's "white matter" enables nerve signals to flow freely between different parts of the brain. In teenagers, the part that governs judgment is the last to be fully connected.Source: Nature Neuroscience 2003
Credit: Elizabeth Sowell
More Vulnerable To Addiction
But that's not the only big difference in teenagers' brains. Nature made the brains of children and adolescents excitable. Their brain chemistry is tuned to be responsive to everything in their environment. After all, that's what makes kids learn so easily.
But this can work in ways that are not so good. Take alcohol, for example. Or nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy ...
"Addiction has been shown to be essentially a form of 'learning,' " Jensen says. After all, if the brain is wired to form new connections in response to the environment, and potent psychoactive drugs suddenly enter that environment, those substances are "tapping into a much more robust habit-forming ability that adolescents have, compared to adults."
So studies have shown that a teenager who smokes pot will still show cognitive deficits days later. An adult who smokes the same dose will return to cognitive baseline much faster.
This bit of knowledge came in handy in Jensen's own household.
"Most parents, they'll say, 'Don't drink, don't do drugs,'" says Will, son number two. "And I'm the type of kid who'd say 'why?' "
When Will asked why, his mom could give him chapter and verse on drugs and teen brains. So they would know, she says, "that if I smoke pot tonight and I have an exam in two days' time, I'm going to do worse. It's a fact."
There were other advantages to having a neuroscientist mom, Will says. Like when he was tempted to pull an all-nighter.
"She would say, 'read it tonight and then go to sleep,'" he says. "And what she explained to me is that it will take [what you've been reading] from your short-term memory and while you sleep you will consolidate it. And actually you will know it better in the morning than right before you went to sleep."
It worked every time, he says.
It also worked for Andrew, the former Goth. He's now a senior at Wesleyan University, majoring in physics.
"I think she's great! I would not be where I am without her in my life!" Andrew says of his mom.
For any parent who has survived teenagers, there are no sweeter
Teen Drinking May Cause Irreversible Brain Damage
by Michelle TrudeauJanuary 25, 2010 www.npr.org
Enlarge Courtesy of Susan Tapert/Tim McQueeny, UCSD
The red specks highlight where the integrity of the brain's white matter is significantly less in the teens who binge drink, compared to those who do not.
For teenagers, the effects of a drunken night out may linger long after the hangover wears off.
A recent study led by neuroscientist Susan Tapert of the University of California, San Diego compared the brain scans of teens who drink heavily with the scans of teens who don't.
Tapert's team found damaged nerve tissue in the brains of the teens who drank. The researchers believe this damage negatively affects attention span in boys, and girls' ability to comprehend and interpret visual information.
"First of all, the adolescent brain is still undergoing several maturational processes that render it more vulnerable to some of the effects of substances," Tapert says.
In other words, key areas of the brain are still under construction during the adolescent years, and are more sensitive to the toxic effects of drugs and alcohol.
Courtesy of Susan Tapert/Tim McQueeny, UCSD
Thought, Memory Functions Affected
For the study, published last month in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, Tapert looked at 12- to 14-year-olds before they used any alcohol or drugs. Over time, some of the kids started to drink, a few rather heavily — consuming four or five drinks per occasion, two or three times a month — classic binge drinking behavior in teens.
Comparing the young people who drank heavily with those who remained non-drinkers, Tapert's team found that the binge drinkers did worse on thinking and memory tests. There was also a distinct gender difference.
"For girls who had been engaging in heavy drinking during adolescence, it looks like they're performing more poorly on tests of spatial functioning, which links to mathematics, engineering kinds of functions," Tapert says.
And the boys?
"For boys who engaged in binge drinking during adolescence, we see poor performance on tests of attention — so being able to focus on something that might be somewhat boring, for a sustained period of time," Tapert says. "The magnitude of the difference is 10 percent. I like to think of it as the difference between an A and a B."
Teenage Tendency To Experiment To Blame
Pediatrician and brain researcher Ron Dahl from the University of Pittsburgh notes that adolescents seem to have a higher tolerance for the negative immediate effects of binge drinking, such as feeling ill and nauseated.
"Which makes it easier to consume higher amounts and enjoy some of the positive aspects," Dahl says. "But, of course, that also creates a liability for the spiral of addiction and binge use of these substances."
He adds that there is a unique feature of the teenage brain that drives much behavior during adolescence: The teen brain is primed and ready for intense, all-consuming learning.
"Becoming passionate about a particular activity, a particular sport, passionate about literature or changing the world or a particular religion" is a normal, predictable part of being a teenager, he says.
"But those same tendencies to explore and try new things and try on new identities may also increase the likelihood of starting on negative pathways," he adds.
Damaged Brain Tissue
Tapert wanted to find out in what way binge drinking affects a teen's developing brain. So using brain imaging, she focused on the white matter, or nerve tissue, of the brain.
"White matter is very important for the relay of information between brain cells; and we know that it is continuing to develop during adolescence," Tapert says.
So Tapert imaged the brains of two groups of high school students: binge drinkers and a matched group of teens with no history of binge drinking. She reports in her recent study a marked difference in the white matter of the binge drinkers.
"They appeared to have a number of little dings throughout their brains' white matter, indicating poor quality," Tapert says.
And poor quality of the brain's white matter indicates poor, inefficient communication between brain cells.
"These results were actually surprising to me because the binge drinking kids hadn't, in fact, engaged in a great deal of binge drinking. They were drinking on average once or twice a month, but when they did drink, it was to a relatively high quantity of at least four or five drinks an occasion," she says.
In another study, Tapert reported abnormal functioning in the hippocampus — a key area for memory formation — in teen binge drinkers. Reflecting their abnormal brain scans, the teen drinkers did more poorly on learning verbal material than their non-drinking counterparts.
What remains unknown, says Tapert, is if the cognitive downward slide in teenage binge drinkers is reversible.
Hardwired For Doom: Brain, Mind And Fate
9:12 amJanuary 25, 2010 www.npr.org
By Adam Frank
"Get down from there!"
My 15-year-old son and I had just come out of the movie theater. After two hours of the usual explosions and mayhem (I can't really remember what movie we had seen) I made the mistake of telling him to wait outside while I chatted with a friend. Five minutes later I find him on the theater roof jumping from one large air conditioning unit to the other. "What are you crazy?" I yelled hoping to get him down, and us away, from there before the blue siren's arrived.
Well, yes. Of course he's crazy. He's 15. Ever since we made the mistake of watching District B13 my son has become a fan of Parkour, which is like freestyle skiing without skis or snow or mountains. Practitioners of Parkour (or its variant Free-running) believe that a good time equals climbing straight up the face of impossibly high walls or leaping from the roof of one 10 story building to another (even if there happens to be a city street in between them). It is a mix of gymnastics, rock climbing and insanity. It's beautiful, graceful and terrifying (if you are a parent). So of course my son loves it and yearns to be an adept. I am trying to guide him to something safer.
Which brings us to today's question. What is the balance between the hardwiring evolution has given us and the cultural programming we have given ourselves?
Brain researchers have found that thrill seeking like Parkour is, to some degree, programmed into the teenage brain. It's part of the need for intense learning. Eventually part of that learning will include internal dialogues like "Don't jump from that building. Its stupid and we will die." But until that kind maturation occurs teenagers need parents around to tell them "Don't jump from that building. Its stupid and you will die."
But we are more than just the hardwiring of our brains, aren't we? In many regards the brains we have now were set in place, genetically at least, some 50,000 years ago. But the difference in culturally constructed behavior between then (hunter-gathers living in small tribes) and now is so vast that we have clearly invented some powerful new behaviors. From the development of agriculture 9000 or so years ago to kingship based empires of the first few millennia BC to the crazy caffeine-fueled high-tech scramble we inhabit now, hasn't culture and not genetics driven our evolution?
This is a question of more than academic interest. One can imagine all kinds of genetically hardwired behavior that was really useful for small bands of social hominids a million years ago that present real problems for a now global species with nuclear weapons (among other toys). Evolutionary psychology combined with impressive advances in brain science is an exciting branch of research that lays bare the physical causes of some aspects of our behavior. But how much of that behavior is hardwired and how much lies in the "new" evolutionary domains of culture (created via the imagination)?
There is the world we are born into and the one we create. What are the boundaries between them and how much play do we have in pushing those boundaries around?
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Einstein's Brain Unlocks Some Mysteries Of The Mind
by Jon HamiltonJune 2, 2010
Listen to the Story
Morning Edition[7 min 47 sec]
Tiny metal electrodes are attached to Albert Einstein's head to pick up impulses from his brain and to magnify and record them for study in 1950 in Princeton, N.J. Dr. Alejandro Arellano kneels beside him.
June 2, 2010
In the 55 years since Albert Einstein's death, many scientists have tried to figure out what made him so smart.
But no one tried harder than a pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who lost his job and his reputation in a quest to unlock the secrets of Einstein's genius. Harvey never found the answer. But through an unlikely sequence of events, his search helped transform our understanding of how the brain works.
In The Name Of Science
How that happened is a bizarre story that involves a dead genius, a stolen brain, a rogue scientist and a crazy idea that turned out not to be so crazy.
The genius, Einstein, died April 18, 1955, at Princeton Hospital in Princeton, N.J. Within hours, the quiet town was swarming with reporters and scientific luminaries, and people who simply wanted to be near the great man one last time, says Michael Paterniti, a writer who did a lot of research on the events of that day.
"It was like the death of the prophet," Paterniti says. "And so it got a little bit crazy."
Things got especially crazy for Thomas Harvey, who performed the autopsy on Einstein. During the procedure, he removed the brain to examine it, which is routine.
But instead of placing the brain back in the skull, Harvey put it in a jar of formaldehyde, Paterniti says.
"And out of that complete, sort of melee of the moment, he made off with the brain, and it was under somewhat dubious circumstances," Paterniti says.
The Man Behind The Marvelous Brain
Although famous for his groundbreaking contributions to science, Albert Einstein's rebellious and eccentric sides were also well-known. Biographers wrote that he struggled at school; and his refusal to wear socks became common knowledge. Here are five more noteworthy facts about Einstein's life.1. In 1952, shortly after the death of Israel's first president, Einstein was offered the job. He declined. In the letter he wrote to the diplomat who offered him the job, one reason he gave was that he wouldn't be good at working with people.
2. When Einstein wanted to divorce his first wife, Mileva Maric, he told her he would win the Nobel Prize one day and give her his future winnings if she'd grant him a divorce. Maric accepted, but had to wait three years for the prize money.
3. As a child, Einstein didn't start talking until he was 3 years old. He continued to have trouble speaking through elementary school, and was still not completely fluent in his own language as a 9-year-old.
4. Einstein's second wife, Elsa Einstein, was also his first cousin.
5. One of Einstein's earliest inspirations was a compass. When given one at age 5, he became transfixed by the needle and wondered what gave it the ability to always swing in the right direction.
Source: Time, news reports, NPR research, American Decades, Notable Mathematicians, Gale Biography Resource Center
--Rose Raymond/NPR
Harvey later said Einstein's older son Hans Albert had given him permission to take the brain. But the Einstein family denied this.
In any event, Harvey lost his job and was denounced by many colleagues. But he kept the brain. His justification, Paterniti says, was a sense of duty to science.
"He believed that his role was to preserve this brain and to put it in the hands of some leading neuroanatomists who might be able to figure out the key to Einstein's genius," Paterniti says.
On The Road With Einstein's Brain
Paterniti caught up with Harvey 40 years later, when the writer became intrigued by the story of Einstein's brain. Over the phone, the men hatched a plan to return the brain to Einstein's granddaughter Evelyn, who was living in Berkeley, Calif.
By that time, Harvey was in his 80s and living alone just a few miles from Princeton.
Paterniti drove down from his home in Maine in a rented Buick Skylark. When he arrived, Harvey was ready to go.
"He brought out his bags," Paterniti says, "and in one bag he had a Tupperware container in which he had stashed the brain."
They put everything in the trunk and started driving west.
Paterniti describes the trip in his book Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein's Brain. The book includes some mind-blowing weirdness, including a stop in Lawrence, Kan., to visit Harvey's former neighbor, the writer and heroin addict William S. Burroughs.
Along the way, Harvey told Paterniti how he had tried to fulfill his duty to science by periodically sending bits of Einstein's brain to various neuroscientists.
"So, he didn't have the entire brain and much of it was sliced up," Paterniti says.
What Came In A Mayonnaise Jar
One scientist who'd asked for samples was Marian Diamond at the University of California, Berkeley. She wanted pieces from four areas in Einstein's brain.
Diamond doesn't talk about her part of this story anymore. But during a 1985 lecture in New York, she described what happened after she asked Harvey for the samples: Harvey agreed to send them, she said, but months went by and nothing happened. Then, three years later, the chunks of brain tissue arrived by mail in a mayonnaise jar.
At the time, the 1980s, most scientists still believed all the important work in the brain was done by neurons. And researchers had already learned from other samples of Einstein's brain that he didn't have a lot of extra neurons.
Astrocytes appear star-like after they're stained.
But Diamond was fascinated by another type of brain cell, called a glial cell. Glia means glue. And the assumption back then was that glial cells were just glue holding a brain together.
Diamond wanted to see if there were more of the glial cells known as astrocytes and oligodendrocytes in Einstein's brain. So she counted them and found that there were, especially in the tissue from an area involved in imagery and complex thinking.
The discovery got a fair amount of attention in the media. But scientists really didn't know what to make of it, says Doug Fields, a brain researcher at the National Institutes of Health.
It was "just an intriguing and peculiar finding, and kind of made people wonder what these astrocytes could be doing," Fields says.
But could they be involved in Einstein's genius in any way?
"At the time it seemed a little bit crazy that they could," Fields says.
Discovering The Other Brain
Then in 1990, a Stanford University researcher named Stephen J. Smith published a paper in the journal Science that would change everything.
Smith knew that neurons communicate using a combination of electrical charges and chemical signals. Scientists had figured that out a long time ago because the electrical charges are hard to miss.
Smith suspected that astrocytes might also have the ability to communicate, but were doing so using only chemical signals, which are easy to miss if you're not looking for them.
And Smith had an even wilder idea: Maybe astrocytes were actually eavesdropping on the chemical conversations between neurons, and rebroadcasting them to distant areas of the brain.
If Smith was right, it would mean that astrocytes could be involved in learning, memory and even genius. Smith tested his idea on living astrocytes taken from a mouse. And Fields, in his lab at the NIH, offered to re-create that landmark experiment.
Astrocytes Communicating
Dr. Fields drips a drop of the neurotransmitter onto the astrocyte cells, which sense the chemical and light up. Then, waves of color radiate out as the chemical message passes from one astrocyte to the next.Source: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, NIH
Credit: R. Douglas Fields
He's staring through a microscope at a dish of astrocytes, which look like stars in a dark night sky.
"I'm going to get a little bit of this glutamate neurotransmitter in a pipette and just drop a bit of it into this culture dish," he says. "And we'll see if the astrocytes can sense that neurotransmitter."
The neurotransmitter in the pipette is glutamate, a chemical messenger often used by neurons.
"OK, I've applied the neurotransmitter," Fields says.
Fields then points to a computer screen filled with a video image of the dish of astrocytes. "Do you see that?" he asks as a cluster of astrocytes lights up with a flash of intense, warm colors.
Then, slowly, great waves of color radiate out from the initial point of contact. The chemical message is passing from one astrocyte to the next.
"I just wish I could get across the amazement of that finding — that these cells that were thought to be stuffing between neurons were communicating," Fields says.
It was like finding a whole other brain within the one we already knew about, Fields says. He says that idea inspired the title of his new book, The Other Brain, which describes how discoveries about the role of glia in the brain have caused a revolution of sorts in the world of neuroscience during the past couple of decades.
"Now we can see scores of ways in which astrocytes could be involved in many cognitive processes," Fields says. "And now it's not so crazy to find that there were abnormally high numbers of astrocytes in the parts of Einstein's brain involved in imagery and mathematical ability and that sort of thing."
Destiny Fulfilled
Fields' book begins with the story of Thomas Harvey stealing Einstein's brain.
Harvey never got a chance to read it. He died in 2007. But there's little doubt he would have been pleased to know that, even in a roundabout way, his actions helped scientists learn something about the nature of genius.
"I think there would be some sense of destiny fulfilled if he knew that," Paterniti says.
As for the stolen brain, Harvey never did give it to Einstein's granddaughter, Paterniti says. She didn't want it.
So Harvey returned the brain to the pathology department at Princeton University, where it remains.
You're Not My Mother: Seeing Impostors
Jad Abumrad and Soren WheelerMarch 30, 2010
Audio for this story from Morning Edition will be available at approx. 9:00 a.m. ET
Magritte's 1964 painting The Intimate Newspaper gets us thinking: Who is this? A familiar friend or a complete stranger?
Fall For An Illusion
text sizeAAAMarch 30, 2010
In the classic 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the residents of a fictional town in California are beset by the feeling that their friends and family have been replaced by impostors. In the movie, this apparent delusion is not delusional at all: The townspeople are in fact being replaced — by aliens, no less.
Numerous sci-fi films since have capitalized on our fear of being surrounded by duplicates — replicas who look just like our loved ones but are not. And while there have so far been no confirmed cases of a human being replaced by an alien or any other life-form, the feeling that your loved one has been replaced by someone else can be very real.
Consider these two true stories:
A 37-year-old woman came into the office of Carol Berman, a psychiatrist at New York University Medical Center, with a strange complaint. She had returned to her house recently to find a man sitting on her couch. He was familiar, sort of, and he was wearing her husband's clothes. But something didn't feel right to this woman. She felt a strange kind of emptiness when she looked at him. She was struck by the very deep sense that her husband had somehow been replaced by this strange man.
A student at the University of California, San Diego was severely injured in a car accident. After several weeks in a coma, he regained consciousness and seemed to be doing fine. But according to V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the university, when the patient's mother came to see him, he exclaimed, "Who is this woman? She looks just like my mother, but she's an impostor! She's some other woman pretending to be my mother."
Rare Delusional Disorder
Both patients, it turns out, were suffering from a rare delusional disorder, called Capgras. Capgras delusion can be brought about by a variety of conditions — changes in brain chemistry associated with different mental illnesses, or physical trauma to the brain — but the delusion always involves the distinct feeling that the people around you have been replaced by impostors. While they may look and act just like the real person, some essence of the person is missing, almost as though "the soul of the person isn't in there," Berman says.
Capgras delusion was first identified by French psychiatrist Joseph Capgras. In a 1923 paper, he wrote about a patient, "Madame M," who for 10 years had been "transforming everyone in her entourage, even those closest to her, such as her husband and daughter, into various and numerous doubles."
Currently, no one is certain of the underlying cause of Capgras, and there are different ways of explaining what is happening to these people. According to Berman, Capgras might be caused by psychological dissonance. There are usually things about the people close to us that we don't like. Normally, we combine these things with the parts we do like and develop a general emotional response to the whole person. But in some extreme cases, a change in character or a newly noticed behavior can just be too difficult to accept, to integrate into the whole. And so, rather than reframing our sense of who that person is, our brain just says: "That must not really be him."
Ramachandran thinks that Capgras can be better explained by a structural problem in the brain. According to Ramachandran, when we see someone we know, a part of our brain called the fusiform gyrus identifies the face: "That looks like mom!" That message is then sent to the amygdala, the part of our brains that activates the emotions we associate with that person. In patients experiencing Capgras, Ramachandran says, the connection between visual recognition and emotional recognition is severed. Thus the patient is left with a convincing face — "That looks like mom!" — but none of the accompanying feelings about his mother.
That's Not My Mother
Ramachandran holds that we are so dependent on our emotional reactions to the world around us, that the emotional feeling "that's not my mother" wins out over the visual perception that it is. The compromise worked out by the brain is that your mother was somehow replaced, and this imposter is part of a malevolent scheme.
Ramachandran thinks there's good evidence for this explanation of Capgras, in part because of an odd quirk in his patient's behavior. When his mother calls him on the phone and he hears her voice, he instantly recognizes her. Yet if she walks in the room after that call, he is again convinced that she is an impostor.
Why? Ramachandran says that our visual system and auditory system have different connections to the amygdala, so while the auditory recognition triggers an emotional response in his patient, visual recognition does not.
Treating The Illness
Capgras is very rare, and little is known about how to treat it. Those who have been afflicted with Capgras due to physical brain trauma may eventually re-establish the connection between perception and emotion. (Ramachandran's patient, for example, eventually recovered from his delusion.) And patients who experience Capgras alongside other mental disorders may be helped by medication. But for many Capgras patients, there is no treatment, and no amount of talk or reasoning can cure them.
While the feeling that the people around you have been replaced by impostors is certainly terrifying to imagine, the effect on the supposed impostor can be devastating, too. Carol Berman's husband began suffering Capgras after the onset of a particular kind of dementia in which neural transmission between different parts of the brain decays. Some days he knows that Berman is his wife. But other days, the woman who walks through the door is an imposter.
"I hope he's recognizing me," says Berman, "but you never know what you're going to get when you get back home."
Can't Remember Faces? Blame Your Genes
by Jon HamiltonFebruary 22, 2010
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All Things ConsideredFebruary 22, 2010
People who struggle to remember faces can blame their parents.
That's because the ability to remember a face is inherited, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers also found that people who are good at remembering faces are not necessarily good at other memory tasks.
Taken together, these results strongly support the idea that face recognition ability comes from a dedicated circuit, or set of circuits, in the brain.
An illustration from the face-recognition study. Nearly 300 pairs of twins were asked to memorize six faces. They were then shown three more faces and asked to identify the one face they had seen before.
Identical Twins, Nearly Identical Ability To Remember
The paper, which comes from an international team, included two different studies.
The first looked at nearly 300 pairs of twins. Some were identical, meaning they share all their genes; others were nonidentical twins, who share only half their genes.
All the twins took a test that involved memorizing six faces. Then, participants were shown three more faces and were asked to identify the one face in this group they had seen before.
Web Resources
Study Findings In PNASTest Your Own Face Recognition AbilityThe face recognition ability of pairs of nonidentical twins often differed quite a bit, says Jeremy Wilmer, the study's lead author and a psychologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
But that wasn't the case with pairs of identical twins, whose performance was "extraordinarily similar," Wilmer says.
These results offer strong evidence that "face recognition ability is a highly familial trait," Wilmer says.
Using A Special Part Of The Brain
The second study used a Web site to test the ability of several thousand people to remember faces, word pairs and abstract art images. The study found no link between face recognition ability and scores on the other tasks.
All of this supports the idea that there is a part of the brain that specializes in processing faces, says Nancy Kanwisher, a brain scientist at MIT.
The most likely candidate is the "fusiform face area," which is located "just behind and underneath, and a bit from your right ear," Kanwisher says.
She says it makes sense that our genes would include special code for such an area, because faces are so important to humans and some other primates.
Faces tell us whether we know a person, what mood they're in, how old they are, and whether they are looking at us or something else, Kanwisher says. "All this rich visual information you can get from a brief glimpse of a face."
Face recognition appears to be so basic, she says, that it is actually hard-wired into the brain.
Similar Findings In Monkeys
Japanese researchers provided strong evidence of this in an experiment with monkeys a couple of years ago, Kanwisher says.
The researchers spent years raising monkeys who never saw a face — human or monkey. The animals were separated from other monkeys, and their human caretakers wore masks.
Even so, when the monkeys were tested, they had "adult-like face discrimination abilities," Kanwisher says, adding that this is probably because the ability to recognize faces is carried in our genes and present from birth.
The finding in monkeys is consistent with experiments on human babies just a few days old, Wilmer says.
When a baby is presented with representations of things like a circle or square and a face, Wilmer says, "The baby will spend a lot of time looking at the face relative to the other things."
How Do You Amputate A Phantom Limb?
Robert Krulwich and Jad AbumradMarch 18, 2009
Listen to the Story
Morning EditionIn one experiment, Ramachandran used a mirror and a cardboard box to perform the first "successful amputation of a phantom limb."
More Research
Ramachandran's PublicationsA WHAT Lives Inside My Brain?
Ever wonder how your brain communicates with your fingers and toes? It all happens deep inside the brain, in a region known as the cortex. And to explain it all, neuroscientists came up with the idea of the “homunculus,” or “little man.”A WHAT Lives Inside My Brain? March 18, 2009 text sizeAAAMarch 18, 2009
We've all heard the expression "I know it like the back of my hand." But just how well do we really understand our relationship to our hands, our legs, or any of our other various body parts?
Dr. V.S. Ramachandran's innovative studies plumb many of the uncharted depths in our understanding of how our bodies and our brains relate to each other, often revealing unexpectedly complex processes for recognizing our physical selves.
In one breakthrough example, Ramachandran, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, devised a seemingly simple experiment to explore a puzzle that has confounded doctors since at least the 16th century: the sensation that a ghostly limb remains after the amputation of a body part.
A Haunting Sensation
The French military surgeon Ambroise Pare, working in the mid-1500s, is believed to have been the first to describe this sensation.
In 1872, the experience was given its modern name when Silas Weir Mitchell, another military surgeon, coined the term "phantom limb." He based it on his experiences at Philadelphia's "Stump Hospital" during the Civil War.
According to Ramachandran, the majority of those who lose a limb experience some impression that the limb is still present. In some cases, a person may only feel it immediately after the loss. And for others, the phantom limb feels not only present, but also quite painful.
A Cause For Reflection
One of Ramachandran's patients complained that he was suffering from an excruciating cramping in his phantom arm. He felt that his phantom hand was clenched so tightly, he could feel his fingernails digging into his phantom palm. The patient was in no way delusional. He knew his arm had been amputated and that the pain was emanating from a nonexistent limb. Yet his grasp of this reality was no match for his perceived pain.
Ramachandran came up with an unusual treatment. He placed a mirror in a cardboard box and instructed the patient to place his existing hand inside the box, next to the mirror. When the patient looked down at the mirror, the reflection of his existing hand stood in as a visual replacement of his phantom limb. The patient was told to imagine that the reflection was in fact the lost limb, and to practice clenching and unclenching his hand while looking in the mirror.
To the patient's surprise — and Ramachandran's — the illusion worked. After two weeks, the patient's pain vanished, along with his perception of a phantom arm.
Mind Over Matter?
How can a limb that no longer exists "feel" pain? And why do some phantom-limb sufferers gain relief from a low-tech optical illusion that tricks their brains into believing something they already know?
Clearly, the body and the brain are intricately involved in the perception of the physical self. But when sensory experiences don't match the brain's perceptions, how is this difference reconciled, and what can we learn from the disconnect?
Herman Melville's iconic Captain Ahab, who himself was haunted by the ghost of a lost leg, ominously raised a timeless question about the discord that can occur between the body and brain: "If I still feel the smart of my crushed leg, though it be now so long dissolved; then, why mayst not thou, carpenter, feel the fiery pans of hell for ever, and without a body?" If the sensation of a leg can persist long after it ceases to exist, what about the rest of a body? Where is the line drawn between the physical self and the perception of self?
Our Bodies, Our Brains, Ourselves?
In a sense, Ramachandran explains, the entire body can be thought of as a type of phantom. And through this phantom construction, the brain can interpret our sensory experiences as we interact with our environment.
The sensation of phantom limbs, and the experiences of patients who are able to relearn the way their brains perceive these phantoms, raise a host of fascinating questions.
Neither purely physical explanations (that the irritation of severed nerves causes phantom feelings) nor purely psychological explanations (that feeling a phantom limb is a form of mental denial) can fully explain what patients describe.
Instead, Ramachandran believes that a complex interaction between the physical and the mental is at play. The brain must reconcile the physical experiences of the body with the mental image, or cortical map, it has of the body. And as the body changes, this mental image can also be remapped.
Unfortunately, in the case of phantom limbs, the mental image doesn't follow the change in the body. That's how you end up feeling pain in an arm that isn't there. But with a mirror and a little creative thinking, Ramachandran was able to trick the brain into remapping its mental image, pulling off what he calls the first "successful amputation of a phantom limb."
A Famous Hallucination: Ahab's Phantom Leg
January 30, 2008Listen to the Story
All Things ConsideredJanuary 30, 2008
The human brain can, indeed, make up things that aren't there — sights, sounds, feelings. Michele Norris has a literary reminder of a famous hallucination: Captain Ahab, from Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. Ahab lost his leg but can feel it still.
Blind Man 'Sees'
by Robert KrulwichJanuary 30, 2008
Listen to the Story
All Things ConsideredVisual hallucinations are a feature of Charles Bonnet syndrome. These phantom images are often "seen" by people with severe visual impairments caused by macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa
January 30, 2008
It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind.
A former long-time executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., Stewart has a hereditary disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects the rods and cones in his eyes. In his 20s, his vision narrowed. By the time he hit 80, he was almost totally blind.
But then he discovered that sometimes blindness comes with a bonus.
One day while listening to a book on tape — 1776 by David McCullough — he heard how American sailors helped George Washington sneak cannons and horses across the Hudson River to escape the British.
As Stewart mused about those sailors, very strangely, one of them appeared in his head — not a dreamy fantasy, but a vivid, highly detailed, very real-like hallucination.
"He had on a cap, a blue cap with a polished black beak and he had a pipe in his mouth." The sailor gazed right at Stewart. Then he winked. Stewart was amazed.
Stewart was, at this point, very blind. He had lost his memory for color — for blues, yellows and reds — and he lived in a black and white world. But when his sailor arrived, "There it was!" he exclaimed. "The first color I had seen for a considerable amount of time!"
After 30 minutes, the image faded, but others would follow. Paintings would come to life. Wallpaper would move. Mysterious curtains would appear. Stewart says he was never frightened, but he wondered what triggered all this.
Who Put that Sailor in My Head?
One of his sons, who already is experiencing this same disease, found the explanation. Stewart has Charles Bonnet syndrome, a condition that often affects people with macular degeneration or diabetic eye disease. A surprisingly large percentage of people who lose sight start seeing things, says ophthalmologist Jonathan Trobe of the University of Michigan.
"The brain is doing a mash-up of stored visual memories," says Trobe. When visual cells in the brain stop getting information — which happens when your rods and cones stop working — the cells compensate, he explains. If there's no data coming in, they make up images. They hallucinate.
Trobe thinks maybe 10 percent of all people who go blind will have this experience. "It's very common," he says.
In 2004, scientists at Harvard blindfolded normal, sighted people, and within hours many of them began to see imaginary landscapes, patterns and occasionally people.
Very often, says Trobe, elderly patients are afraid to mention these appearances, fearing that family members or doctors will think them mentally unstable. And while some people do get frightened by what they see in their heads, most don't.
Stewart, in fact, says he has learned to enjoy his phantoms. He can even trigger them, he thinks.
Tuna Sashimi and Pink Dresses
When he was going blind, Stewart was advised to eat fish as often as possible, so he developed a thing for tuna, especially tuna sashimi.
Before our interview, he told me that tuna at lunch often triggers hallucinations. So Jessica, my producer, brought him a private stash. And sure enough, about 10 minutes later he matter-of-factly "noticed" a green curtain in the room.
I couldn't see a curtain. I couldn't see the office globe that followed floating through the air. I couldn't see the pink dress that came after the globe.
The thing is, Stewart shows no signs of being a flake or a hysteric. He was a manager, a financial officer, a pioneer in arts broadcasting in Europe. He's a sober man who has discovered, to his delight, that he can still experience color, even though, technically there is nothing there for him to see.
It's an experience manufactured by his hallucinating brain. But rather than be spooked by these phantoms, he wants more of them. It's as though, having been deprived of sight, he has figured out a final end run and instead of seeing from the outside in, he now sees from the inside out.
And if Stewart's hallucinating brain interests you, check out the story about what happens to deaf people who also hallucinate. You'll learn about an older lady who "heard" the voice of what may have been her long-dead mother.
Or, listen to what happened to a young sailor, not deaf, who was just stuck on an empty, flat quiet ocean for two weeks and "heard" phantom heavy metal guitar riffs and bagpipes.
Special thanks to independent producer Mary Beth Kirchner. Support for this story was provided by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives.
A Life Without Fear
by Alix SpiegelApril 26, 2010
Morning Edition - www.npr.org
April 26, 2010
The drama class had just gotten out, and everybody was standing around talking when Jessica noticed her 9-year-old, Isabelle, making her way over to an elderly woman Jessica had never seen. The woman was neatly dressed, most likely just a well-meaning suburban grandmother who had come to retrieve a grandchild on behalf of an over-extended parent, most likely a perfectly harmless person.
Isabelle, as she usually did, exchanged hellos and struck up a conversation. It was the usual post-drama-class conversation until about two minutes in. Then Isabelle dropped the bomb.
"Will you take me? Can I go home with you?" Jessica heard Isabelle plead.
Driven To Trust
Jessica's daughter, Isabelle, has Williams syndrome, a genetic disorder with a number of symptoms. Children with Williams are often physically small and frequently have developmental delays. But also, kids and adults with Williams love people, and they are literally pathologically trusting. They have no social fear. Researchers theorize that this is probably because of a problem in their limbic system, the part of the brain that regulates emotion. There appears to be a disregulation in one of the chemicals (oxytocin) that signals when to trust and when to distrust.
This means that it is essentially biologically impossible for kids like Isabelle to distrust. (NPR is not using full names in this story for privacy and safety reasons.)
"They don't have that kind of evolutionary thing that other kids have, that little twinge of anxiety like, 'Who is this person? What should I do here?' " Jessica explains. "They just don't have it. She just doesn't have that ... early-warning system."
For Jessica, there are good and bad things about parenting a child with this kind of personality.
For instance, when Isabelle was younger, she was chronically happy. She smiled at anything. She loved everyone: family, friends, strangers. She reached for them all, and, in return, everyone loved her. Strangers would stop Jessica to tell about how adorably loving Isabelle was.
In those days, Jessica says, she and her family were more or less tolerant of Isabelle's trusting and loving nature. "We would try to restrain her, but it was somewhat half-heartedly, because we didn't want to embarrass her by calling her on the carpet about how open she was," Jessica says.
The Danger Of Unconditional Trust
But as Isabelle got older, the negative side of her trusting nature began to play a larger role. A typical example happened a couple of years ago, when Jessica and her family were spending the day at the beach. Isabelle had been begging Jessica to go to Dairy Queen, and Jessica had been putting her off. Then Isabelle overheard a lady just down the beach.
Isabelle practices training the family dog, "Betsy," with her dad.
"She was telling her kids, 'OK, let's go to the Dairy Queen,' " Jessica says. "And so Isabelle went over and got into the lady's van, got in the back seat, buckled up and was waiting to be taken to Dairy Queen with that family."
Jessica had no idea what had happened to Isabelle and was frantically searching for her when the driver of the van approached her and explained that she had been starting her car when she looked up and saw Isabelle's face in the rearview mirror.
The woman, Jessica says, was incredibly angry.
"She said, 'I am a stranger, you know!' " Jessica says. Essentially, the woman blamed Jessica for not keeping closer watch on her daughter -- for neglecting to teach her the importance of not getting into a car with someone she didn’t know. But the reality could not be more different. "It's like, 'My friend, you have no idea,' " Jessica says.
In fact, because of Isabelle, Jessica has had to rethink even the most basic elements of her day-to-day life. She can not take Isabelle to the dog park. She tries not to take Isabelle to the store. And when the doorbell rings, Jessica will leap over a coffee table to intercept her.
It's not just Jessica and her family who must be vigilant. Every teacher at Isabelle's public school has been warned. Isabelle is not allowed to tell them that she loves them. Isabelle is not supposed to tell other schoolchildren that she loves them. And there are other restrictions.
"She's not allowed to go to the bathroom alone at her school, because there have been numerous instances of girls with Williams syndrome being molested at school when they were alone in the hallway," Jessica says. "And these are like middle class type schools. So it's a very real problem. And, you know, I'd rather her be overly safe than be on CNN."
Raising A Child With Williams Syndrome
Jessica spoke with me for over an hour in the family's home in their woodsy, suburban neighborhood while we waited for her three children to come home from school. Then, just after I turned off my recorder to take a break, I felt two small arms circle my neck from behind. It was Isabelle. She had crept in from school and was giving me a hug.
I turned around, and quite suddenly, the room was filled with questions. Who was I? What was I doing here? Which TV show did I like? Did I know the Muppets?
Then Isabelle took my microphone in her hands. She had decided to sing me a song:
"You're my friend ... You're my friend in the whole world," she crooned. "You look so nice and so beautiful and so sweet."
When Isabelle speaks, she has a slight nasal slur. She also has some cognitive issues. Though she goes to a regular school and sits in a regular third-grade class, her attention is very jumpy, and she needs aids to help her.
These cognitive issues make Jessica's job more difficult. Jessica has decided that the most important thing for her to do is to teach Isabelle how to distrust. For years, that has been her life project -- a battle pitched against biology itself.
Jessica and her husband have made Isabelle books about how to behave around strangers. They have rented videos, they have bought educational toys. They have modeled the right behaviors, constructed sticker charts and employed every other trick they could possibly think of. But distrust, it seems, is almost impossible to teach their child. Sometimes Isabelle manages to remember not to tell perfect strangers that she loves them. Mostly, she doesn't.
But Jessica is determined. "We just have to restart every time," she says. "It's just what we have to do."
It's what they have to do, Jessica reasons, because she won't be around to protect her daughter forever. And though Isabelle trusts the world completely, the world is not a place worthy of complete trust.
Even in their current life, Jessica says, there are moments when she realizes that she's just an instant away from something terrible.
"We live a very sheltered life, but I can think of times when we were at the pool and I turn around to talk to someone, and I see her practically sitting on some man's lap at the pool, and he looks very uncomfortable," Jessica says. "And I just think: This is not good."
Unconditional Love, And A Mother's Worry
Fortunately, Jessica says, the experts tell her it will eventually get better. She needs to just keep at it. One day, they tell her, Isabelle will be able to learn not to feel distrust, per se, but to master a set of algorithms that will allow her to safely navigate the world. She will learn, for example, not to get into a car with a stranger if she has become lost or disoriented, but to ask some person in a uniform for help instead.
In the meantime, Jessica says there are plenty of rewards to this life -- a life with a child with boundless love and trust.
"She'll ask me, 'So how are you today, my darling?' " Jessica says. "And it just makes you smile."
In fact, late in the afternoon on the day I visited, everyone in the family gathered in the kitchen to eat dinner. Isabelle, who loves music, decided to play a CD.
The CD player stuttered then came to life, and Isabelle approached her father.
"Will you dance with me, my sweetie?" she asked.
Her father picked her up in his arms. He spun her round and round.